News from the Wars

In the latest blow to the American counterinsurgency and nation-building effort in Afghanistan, a U.S. Army sergeant with eleven years of service and three previous deployments under his belt, and a wife and two children back home, walked off his base in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province and massacred at least sixteen Afghan civilians in their homes, including nine children, afterward setting fire to the bodies.

The incident follows several recent controversies, including a videotape showing Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters, and an incident in which soldiers set fire to several Korans while burning trash from a prison outside Kabul. American officials fear that this latest atrocity will further outrage an already inflamed Afghan population, and jeopardize efforts to negotiate a resolution to the conflict before NATO forces leave, in 2014.

In this country, the percentage of Americans who want an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan is now over half and appears to include Newt Gingrich, who said on Sunday, “We’re not prepared to be ruthless enough.”

The pessimism was shared by the outgoing British ambassador in Kabul, Sir William Patey, who told the Daily Telegraph that foreign forces have overstayed their welcome: “We were too focused on Iraq and we took our eye off the ball. We thought we had won [in Afghanistan] and the Taliban had run away and we just sort of left it to the Afghans to get on with it and we very quickly switched our focus to Iraq. You don’t normally write history so quickly but I’m pretty clear that we won’t have to wait too long for history to make that judgment.”

The massacre in Afghanistan is making a lot of people write history today. It’s the sort of incident that immediately symbolizes extreme violence and futility and the inevitable end of a war effort. It’s already in the books. After this, it’s impossible to imagine any kind of honorable and satisfactory conclusion to the decade of American involvement in Afghanistan. We already know that the Panjwai killings will have a prominent place in accounts of the Afghan war, like My Lai in South Vietnam and Abu Ghraib and Haditha in Iraq. And just as those atrocities stained everyone who had anything to do with those wars, Panjwai will be a blight on every soldier and civilian and policymaker who left any fingerprints on the Afghan war, no matter how good their intentions, no matter how hard they tried to make it come out right.

I was in Iraq just after the photos from Abu Ghraib went public (the story was broken by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and by CBS). An Army sergeant in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, said, “I’m sick of reading about what five people did to a bunch of shit-bag Iraqis. I mean, what they did was wrong. Just not representative.” Other soldiers in the same company aimed their anger at the American M.P.s at Abu Ghraib, for blowing it, for making their job that much harder. The company commander said, “It would be nice to let the American people know that the problems here aren’t just because Americans have cultural flaws. It’s because these people have cultural flaws, too.” No doubt plenty of Americans in Afghanistan are feeling much the same way today—sick and furious about the atrocity, resentful of the blame.

The company commander in Iraq added, “We can change a culture. We have to lean on it, and lean on it, and lean on it. And Americans want it to be done in three months. If people are getting killed, fuck it. And that’s a cultural flaw.” A lot’s gone wrong since then, and I wonder how many Americans in Afghanistan would still say the same thing—almost none, I’d guess. That’s the takeaway of a decade of fighting. Whatever the justifications and rationalizations of the post-9/11 wars, they turned into efforts at changing a culture, by force of arms. Even when Bush officials insisted that Iraq’s future was up to the Iraqis. Even when President Obama said we weren’t doing nation-building in Afghanistan. The Panjwai massacre feels like the final punctuation mark on that idea.

Meanwhile, here’s the latest from Iraq:

The Christian population is well below half of its pre-war level, and now even the Kurdish north is no longer safe for Christian refugees, who are fleeing Kurdistan to Turkey, Jordan, and—if they can—the U.S.

Shiite gangs have gone on a killing spree aimed at young Iraqis who dress in the style known as “emo,” and whom many Iraqis believe to be gay, or even devil worshippers. The victims—the number may be as high as ninety or a hundred—have had their skulls crushed with concrete blocks.

Iraqis who worked for the U.S. government continue to be targeted in their own country, while the doors to American immigration remain shut tight to them.

Bombings and assassinations continue to be daily realities in Baghdad and elsewhere.

In foreign policy, Iraq has positioned itself as the only Arab friend of the Iran-Syria axis, while Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army continues to slaughter civilians, and the theocratic regime of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, consolidates its hold on every lever of state power and plays nuclear brinkmanship with the region and the world.

If things look grim in Afghanistan, they hardly look better in Iraq. And it’s terrible to think that this is the meaning of all those years of war, all that death and heartbreak. It’s even more terrible to wonder if that was the only meaning they ever could have had, though history will take longer to write that one. In a couple of years, probably faster, we’ll have vanished from places like Panjwai, as we’re gone today from Haditha and Mahmudiyah. And since we’re Americans, we’ll have soon moved on from the decade in Afghanistan just as we’re well on our way to forgetting about the nine years in Iraq—except for the Americans who fought, who have a harder time forgetting.

But after we’re gone there will still be Afghans in Afghanistan, facing the return to power of the Taliban, as there are still Iraqis in Iraq, hunted down by the militias and unprotected by the police. Walking away eventually becomes the only thing for foreigners to do. We’re on our way there in Afghanistan—a little faster after today. But don’t mistake that for any kind of successful extrication, or negotiated bilateral relationship, or return to American priorities. It will be hell for Afghans, as it’s hell today for Iraqis—hell with us there, hell after we leave.